


Route 117

by seenonlyfromadistance



Category: Lost Boys (Movies), Stand By Me (1986), The Body - Stephen King
Genre: Blood and Gore, Disaffected youths, Gen, Vampires, ace merrill is bad person who does and says bad things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seenonlyfromadistance/pseuds/seenonlyfromadistance
Summary: In another world he’s still just Ace Merrill, another j.d. kid who lives and dies in Castle Rock, Maine-- but instead he hitches out of town along Route 117, gets picked up by the wrong car and it’s the end of everything.





	Route 117

**Author's Note:**

> well this started as two paragraphs of Ace-is-David and grew into way more than that. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

If there was one thing he had always liked, always, even when he was alive-- when he was nothing more than a shit-heel teenager in Maine, beating up on grade school kids for being pussies, before Max picked him up thumbing his way out of Castle Rock and gave him something to drink out of a bottle without a label-- it was making trouble surrounded by a pack of boys. As a living boy, he had surrounded himself with punks and thugs and enjoyed nothing more than wreaking havoc. It was about all that made him feel alive in his small town. Picking fights, smoking, shooting pool, beating up kids and smashing mailboxes with his gang of Cobras. Small thrills for a small life.

In another world he’s still just Ace Merrill, another j.d. kid who lives and dies in Castle Rock, causing trouble even after he knocks up some girl on accident. Just like his old man, meaning. Or eventually he smashes a bottle over someone’s head or gets caught boosting cars and spends a few years in Shawshank. Or he hitches as far as Massachusetts, or upstate New York, and does the same thing just in a different town. 

If only he hadn't totaled his Ford, he never would have been hitching to begin with. He could have driven all the way to New York City if he wanted, if only he hadn't smashed his car into an oncoming truck. A game of chicken that finally turned sour on him. The doctors tell him it's a miracle he lived at all. The doctors tell him it was damned lucky no one else was in the car with him or they would have absolutely been dead, the way the truck smashed his Ford in half. During his week in the hospital, his dad comes to hide him but only because he smashed up the car, not because his son was playing fast and loose with his life. It's about then, laying in a hospital bed with a broken collarbone, while being called a no-good piece of shit by his very own father, that Ace decides to leave Castle Rock.

Eyeball Chambers came to see him in the hospital too. “What were you thinkin’, Ace?” He’d whispered. “You coulda killed yerself.” Ace just glared at him, and didn’t answer. Eyeball was never all that bright anyway.

If only he still had his Ford, he never would have met Max or drank his blood or became the thing he is now. 

But instead an old dweeb picks him up in the middle of the night along route 117, driving a battered old Chevy with a dog in the backseat, and offers to drive him as far as he wants. The guy behind the wheel is definitely a square, that's clear, and probably a fag, Ace thinks, because of his hair and big glasses and the fact that no reasonable, normal square would pick up a kid who looked like him, with his bleached out hair and mean face and the cigarette behind his ear. But fag or no, Ace takes the ride because anywhere out of Castle Rock is better than Castle Rock. Even if it's only Castle Green or Derry or Mechanic Falls. Anywhere away from his small, shitty hometown and his small, shitty gang of degenerates who will never do anything or go anywhere and never even wanted to. All he's ever wanted is to get away from Castle Rock, away from his small, shitty life. Away from how boring everything is. 

Well, that's what meeting Max gives him, that's for sure. Distance. Thrills. Undeniably. Especially at the start.

And Max is alright, really, eventually, in the end, once they get settled. Tries to be a dad to him, sincerely, which is okay since his own dad was nothing more than a drunk who beat up on anything he could lay hands on. There's a reason Ace was hitching out of town, after all. 

Max doesn't even ask his name before offering him the blood. Maybe if Max had picked up Vince or Billy Tessio, they would've been taken and had a second life as a monster. 

Oh well.

It's Ace who's hitching, and Ace who gets picked up. Ace who accepts the drink even though he doesn't know what it is-- he assumes it's booze, of course, and the guy is just trying to get him tipsy enough to allow some pawing as payment for the ride. Usually Ace would smash a guy up for trying something like that, but he can’t bring himself to care if it means getting out of town. He’ll take what he can get as far as rides go, which isn’t much in the middle of the night.

Max hands over the bottle without looking at him.

"Where are you headed again?" He asks. 

"Anywhere," Ace grits. "Anywhere but Castle Rock. And I'm never going back." 

Max nods, hmm-ing in approval. Ace fingers the rim of the bottle, feeling his lip curl into a sneer. He knows it's ugly, but he can't help it. To hide it, he brings the bottle to his lips. He hesitates just for a moment, though he doesn't know why. It's just a hitch of bad feeling, then he's swigging back a large swallow of the liquid in the bottle. It's warm, like wine, but thicker than wine. He swallows and it clings to the inside of his mouth. There's a metallic tang to the flavor which sets off some alarm signals-- or it would if the drink didn't also set a clanging thrill shooting through Ace's body to his very core. He can feel it in his bones, in his blood, in every nerve from head to toe. His heart starts to race, and he takes another sip. Just because. The thrill subsides to a continuous thrumming buzz. It feels _good_. Freaky good. He takes another, shallower, sip.

Ace half wonders what this old square has with shit like this in his car, some kind of moonshine or maybe it's laced with something. He licks his own teeth to get every drop down his throat. 

"It's good," he says, feeling the buzz move through his veins. “What is it?”

Max gives a grin that has a sharp edge and doesn’t answer. Ace shifts in his seat. Maybe he should ask to be let out, he thinks. But he's hardly gotten anywhere yet. Not even outside Castle County lines. And surely he can handle this guy, if he has to, right? Ace is young and tough and nasty. This guy looks like a grade school teacher. He puts away the niggling worry. 

"Well young man, what's your name?"

"Ace." Max clucks his disapproval in response, like a square, and Ace says, "that's what I'm called. Ace Merrill. My friends, I mean--" Why is he even bothering to justify himself to this goon? What's the point? Something pulls at him, towards this old dork driving the car. Something deep in his gut and in his chest. He’s never had to explain who he is before. Ever since he was twelve and he kicked out Charlie Hogan’s front teeth the whole town of Castle Rock knew him.

"Not really a name, is it?" Max shakes his head and adjusts his glasses with one hand, pushing them back up the bridge of his nose. "What's on your birth certificate, Mr. Merrill?"

He's so formal it's almost funny, and Ace lets his gentle, nasty smile emerge as he answers. "John. John David Merrill."

"David, hm? Yes, I like that. David, I'm Max, by the way. That’s Thorn.” He gestures with his chin towards the big dog in the back. It lifts its ears in his direction. “Pleasure to have you along for the ride." No one has ever called him David, before that night. It sits strangely on him, less comfortable than Ace, slightly more comfortable than John, a name only his father had ever thrown at him, and rarely even then. Max offers a hand across his chest and Ace reaches to shake it. It startles him how cold the skin is. "You know, a boy like you really shouldn't be out on the side of the road so late at night." 

Ace shrugs, slouching down in his seat. "Worried about bad elements? Bad elements should be worried about me, daddy-o." He means thugs and rapists and murderers. He's not worried about people like that. He's met his fair share of each, and only nineteen years old from a small town in Maine. Max laughs a light, amused chuckle. Like his passenger said something cute. 

"Hitch-hiking can be very dangerous," Max says, ignoring Ace’s tough words. He's teacherly, Ace thinks. Trying to impart wisdom. Teacherly in that condescending way that sent Ace Merrill running from school and into the pool hall. It grates the wrong way, just a little. "You have to be careful. You never know who’ll pick you up." 

A giddy laugh bursts from Ace’s chest. Whatever the bottle was spiked with, it’s good. Good shit. Sincerely. Ace feels delirious, high. Like a night with no sleep and too much cheap liquor and too many cigarettes. Buzzing. 

Max drives for hours, straight out of Maine and through New Hampshire. He’s amiable and patient and manages to coax from Ace his entire shitty life story. His shitty dad and the whole thing. The gang he built up just so he’d have kids to run with, and kids to push around. “I hate being alone,” he sneers, leaning his spinning head against the window. “But no one in Castle Rock was worth spit.” Across the state line, Ace feels a change. He thinks it's freedom, distance, a new life opening up. His head clears out a little, and he rolls down the window to breathe in the fresh air of a different state. This is the farthest from Castle Rock he's ever been. His new life is about to begin, he can feel it. As the sun starts to peek over the horizon, Max pulls off the highway saying, "Can't drive forever, can we?" 

"I can drive," Ace volunteers. "I'm a great driver. Sincerely. If you want to sleep." In the backseat, Thorn, the big dog, lifts his head off his paws and gives a breathy _harrumph_. 

Max looks at him, long and hard, his eyes clear behind his big glasses. "Okay, David," he purrs. "You drive." 

“Ace,” he corrects, even as he climbs out of the passenger seat. “It’s Ace.”

They spend ten minutes over the hood of the car, Max pointing at maps and routes, charting a course. Thorn runs through the grass on the edge of the highway. Ace doesn't think to ask where Max's final destination is. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s far away from Maine. Once it’s all settled, Max settles into the passenger seat, slouching very low. "Drive safely now," he says with finality, and pulls his thick windbreaker jacket over his face. 

Ace feels almost alone in the big Chevy. It's a bigger car than his Ford had been, but it drives so smooth it's like air. Letting out the clutch is like slicing through warm butter. An intrusive thought tells him to kill Max and steal his car, it’s so goddamn nice. The sun rises and Ace rolls down the window to put his arm out in the warming air. A giddy glow starts to burn in his heart. _Free_ , he thinks. Free to do whatever he wants. Free to start over someplace where no one knows him. 

Pretty quickly, the pleasantly warm feeling of sun on his skin starts to makes him itch. His eyes are burning, maybe because he's been up for the better part of the night, maybe something else. Maybe whatever shit was in that bottle is giving him a late turn hangover. Groping around with one hand, Ace finds it again and wriggles out the cork. In the light of day, it seems congealed, sickly and sticky. Still, he brings it to his mouth and takes a determined swallow. 

It tastes worse, sharper, more coppery, bitter. But again the electric thrill jolts through his blood. 

"Shit," he says to the road and the bottle and the dog, and the figure curled into the corner of the car. "Holy shee-it." It takes serious effort not to push the pedal to the floor and let loose. A howl builds under his chin. Ace Merrill, whoever that was, is retreating with every passing mile. He doesn’t know it yet, but Ace Merrill will soon be long gone, replaced with someone-- something-- else. He runs his tongue over his teeth, tasting the lingering metallic tang. The enamel is slick. It's good to be alive. 

The course Max had chosen winds through mostly back roads, through trees, meaning the drive is mostly leisurely and mostly in the shade. When he stops for gas, Max is still asleep, and doesn't stir. At the pump station, Ace lifts a pair of sunglasses for himself from the attached little store. Those help his increasingly aching head. It crosses his mind that he should be hungry, but nothing appeals. 

As the sun sets over the edge of the earth, Max stirs under his jacket and then emerges from it. He's rumpled and groggy looking, his hair a mess and his glasses askew. Seeing Ace at the wheel of his car, his face cracks into a twist of a smile. 

"Where are we, David?" From behind the wheel, Ace hands over the map and points generally at a spot in New York. His teeth are grinding together, maybe at being called the wrong name again, maybe at something else. The something else is harder to pinpoint. Max examines the map for a moment, then says, "Let's stop." 

Obligingly, because he's been driving more or less non-stop for ten hours, Ace pulls off to the side of the road. Max gets out to stretch. There's a farmhouse off the road, it's lights just starting to come on for the evening, twinkling in the darkness. Leaning against the rear fender, Ace lights a cigarette. He wonders how long he'll ride with Max, and what Max will expect when he finally decides to peel off. They've ridden along for so long that he's starting to worry-- maybe it'll be more than the tipsy grope he'd guessed at when he got in the car in the first place. He’s not quite sure how far he’s willing to go.

A pang goes through his stomach, not exactly at the thought, but badly timed. He groans, instinctively bending himself over. It’s not a pang at all, really, he thinks as another sharp sting goes through him. It’s a _pain_. A _terrible pain_. 

“Are you alright, David?” Max asks lightly, coming around the side of the car. Ace’s hands are trembling and he drops his cigarette. 

“Oh shit,” he groans, bending nearly in half now. “Fuck, fuck.” 

Max takes one look at him and clucks his tongue. _Tsk Tsk_. “There, there,” he says and the bottle, that fucking bottle, appears in Ace’s line of vision. 

“Fuck that,” he hisses, and swats it out of Max’s hand. It hits the asphalt with a clatter and cracks. The dark liquid inside starts to seep out, and in the evening light it looks black. “What the fuck is that shit, anyway?” The shaking of his hands has gotten visibly worse. The smell of whatever was in the bottle hits his nose, tangy and thick and horrible, and he collapses to his knees, gagging, smashing his kneecaps against the hard road. “What did you fucking do to me?”

A hand settles onto the back of his head, soothing. “I’ve given you a gift, David.” 

Sweat breaks out across his forehead, and Ace thinks, _This fucking fag drove me all this way to drug me and fuck me and kill me_. It’s enough to rise some serious fire in Ace’s guts and he rises from his knees to hurl his body at Max, to try and knock him over. His shoulder hits hard to Max’s hip, but Max doesn’t go down. He’s too solid. Solid and cold like the blocks of ice that used to get delivered to Castle Rock General. Ace and the gang used to chip off pieces in the summer and chuck them at girls. A lifetime ago.

Max grabs him by his shirt front and lifts him-- and he’s strong, so fucking strong. Ace wriggles, but his head is swimming and the pain shoots through his guts again, cutting down his legs and up through his lungs. And then something else shoots through his heart, something he hasn’t felt since the Chambers kid aimed a gun at him with serious violent intent in his eyes: Fear. 

Max’s face has changed. He doesn’t look like a dweeby school teacher anymore, but like a ghoul. Something inhuman. Ace shudders and Max throws him back against the car. Ace’s knees give out from under him and he slumps, crumpled against a tire. Max looms over him, his yellow eyes gleaming in the night. This is a nightmare. It has to be. 

One hand finds it’s trembling way to his pocket and Ace finds his switch waiting for him, a comforting presence. Feeling a desperate flash of hope that if he can get one good slice in, he’ll be able to escape, Ace closes his fingers around it. A last ditch attempt. This or he’s dead on the side of the road. The blade is out in a heartbeat, snapping into place like a salute. His arm moves, jutting towards what he knows is the big artery in the thigh, aiming to kill. He’s fast but Max is faster. His clawed hand catches Ace’s wrist before any damage can be done, and with a squeeze and a twist the wrist is broken. Bones snap like a twigs. The switch goes flying into the night to clatter onto the asphalt. A choked cry comes from Ace’s throat. Max shoves him back up against the side of the car, and this time he stays still. 

“Don’t be afraid, David,” it hisses. _It_ because it’s not a man anymore, it’s something else, something horrible. “Don’t fight. We’ll be a family. Isn’t that what you wanted?” 

Fear keeps him pinned in place. Fear brings to the forefront of his mind the picture from the horror comics Danny Naughton used to read-- the open, screaming mouths, the blood, the fangs and oh god, the fangs, the fangs that are coming closer and closer and then he feels pain, tearing pain at his throat and Ace Merrill thinks, _I’m fucking dead_ , as the world goes black.

-

He comes to, not dead, not yet, in the farmhouse off the side of the two-lane highway they’d pulled to the side of. It feels like a year ago, a lifetime ago. His body aches, especially his knees and his throat and his head. Someone’s laid him out on a sofa, and for a brief, warm moment Ace imagines that the family in the farmhouse found him on the road, passed out and bleeding, sure, but alive, and brought him in and are going to take good care of him.

But then he smells the tang that is by now familiar. And by now he knows what it is. Blood. His heart drops into his stomach.

It sickens him, and he twists on the sofa to face the floor as bile rises in his throat. He wants to puke, wants badly to puke, but opening his eyes reveals too much blood. The floor is coated in blood like a carpet. Somehow that puts a stop to his rising gorge and another sensation overtakes him. This one sickens him too, in a different way. His mouth starts to water. It’s hunger now. Want. Horrible, horrible want. His vision blurs under a strong wave of it-- he can smell the blood, too clearly, too crisply. The salt of it, the coppery heat. 

Retreating back into the cushions of the sofa, Ace buries his face against the fabric. It helps brush the wave of appetite away, but not enough.

“David,” a voice sing-songs. It’s Max. Along with him come the muffled shouts of a living, breathing human being. Ace can feel a heartbeat in the air, fast and powerful and calling to him. 

“No, no, no,” he keens. He knows now. The horror comics. Max’s distorted face, his teeth, the pain in Ace’s neck. A vampire. A fucking vampire. _Bullshit_. No such thing. _Fuck_. Yet here he is. _Bull-true_.

“You have to feed, David. Don’t be stubborn now.” 

“Go screw,” he bites. A strong hand takes him by the shoulder and turns him over, onto his back. Above him hovers Max’s monstrous face, his twisted, grotesque features. Held tight against him, by the throat, is a middle aged woman, struggling and weeping against Max’s hold. The lady of the house, no doubt. Ace recoils. The smell of the blood on the floor, the pulse of her heart, so close now… it’s too much. His teeth ache, like right before the dentist puts the drill to them.

“David.” Ace slams his eyes shut and turns his face away. “Now, now, David. It’s too late to turn back now. You have my blood in you.” 

Ace always had bad blood in him, that’s what everyone said. Bad rummie dad and a Ma who didn’t give a single shit how her boy turned out. That bad Merrill clan of Castle Rock. Bad blood, bad blood...

The woman’s struggles sound like a rabbit, wriggling in a trap. Squeaks and squeals and thrashing. He can imagine her frightened eyes. Just like a rabbit. Maybe nothing more than a rabbit. He’s killed rabbits. 

He’s hurt people in his life, and badly. He’s not scared to hurt people. Not scared to kill them, even, though he’s never done it before. Never even gotten close enough to be sent up to the reformatory. He’s been called a monster all his life, and the hunger in his stomach that radiates through every vein and blood vessel in his body says he’s becoming some other kind of monster. A real monster, not just a bad kid. He hitched with the wrong car. He’ll die in this strange house, surrounded by blood and this _fuckin' monster_. And hell, why fucking not?

 _God_ , his teeth hurt, his body hurts, makes him weak. He’s never felt so weak in his life. Vaguely he notices that his wrist, which had snapped under the pressure of a vampire’s grip, feels entirely intact again. 

“Don’t fight, David. You’ll be happier once you give in.” 

Ace opens his eyes in time to see Max’s long clawed fingernails rip into the woman’s throat, silencing her rabbit whimpers and replacing them with wet fish gurgles. He sees the pink of her muscle, the white of cartilage, and then it’s all drowned in blood. Red blood, brilliantly red, gushes from her neck and splashes down onto his face.

It’s so hot. It’s hot and, like when Lachance dumped ice water on him the summer before he went off and got himself killed, it freezes him up completely. It had thrown him off long enough for Lachance to run off, laughing and dragging his little shit brother behind him by the hand, and it’s the same thing now. He freezes. It’s the shock of it at first, the terrible shock of being splashed with a spatter of anything, let alone thick, stinking blood. His mouth falls open into a surprised, pouting O, and the blood pours in. That’s shocking too. Shocking because it’s hot and salty and still pulsing with the life of the woman it’s draining out of. He should hate it, and there’s a lot he hates about it-- the taste, the slick, slimy way it sticks to his teeth, the slide of it over his chin and the way it drips in heavy drops down over his chest. 

He also hates how it makes him shiver, how his back arches into the spray. How invigorated he feels after just a few sputtering swallows-- how, without conscious choice, his mouth finds the open gash on the woman’s throat and sucks. He should want to get away from it, and even now a part of him, far away, is yelling _Stop! Stop! Stop!_ But he doesn’t. He can’t. 

It’s like kissing, he thinks hysterically as the blood pours into his mouth, from her throat to his. Girls’ mouths are warm and wet like this. So are their pussies. Mouths and cunts and wounds, all the same. He fucked a girl on her period once and it was nothing like this. When he takes his mouth from her throat to laugh, giddy and tingling all over, Max pulls the woman away. Ace falls back against the sofa cushions, laughing wildly. A howl builds in his heart and he lets it out, shouting and howling and hooting like he just dodged a damn train. His heart is pounding in his ears and Thorn joins in the howling, running up to put his paws on Ace’s shoulder. Somewhere above, Max smiles a gentle, nightmarish smile. 

The laughter fades with the blood buzz, leaving Ace woozy and sticky, covered in blood. His t-shirt, once white but never again, is drenched at the front, sticking to his chest like he went swimming in it. His green canvas jacket, hawked from Billy Tessio two years before, is spattered all over. Ruined. Ace pants, his breath coming in ragged, harsh draws. It feels like he just ran a mile, or fucked a girl in the cramped backseat of a car. He’s about as sticky and about as slack. As he returns to his body, he half expects to realize he has a hardon, but he doesn’t. His dick is as limp as the rest of him.

The room is quiet, save for Thorn’s snuffling growls. The floral wallpaper is too cheery for the carnage that now surrounds it. Across the room is a man laying face down in a pool of blood that smears all the way to the sofa-- the farmer who owned the farmhouse, Max’s first victim of the night. The body is mangled, one arm torn nearly off. Max drops his wife to the floor as well and stands, removing a knee from between Ace’s legs. 

“There, there, my boy,” Max says, batting at Ace’s feet to move so he can sit next to him on the blood soaked sofa. “Isn’t that better?” With effort, Ace pulls his feet off the cushions and somehow finds the floor with them. Thorn puts his head in Max’s lap and Max tousles his ears. Like no one is dead at their feet at all. The woman lays there, her gurgling finished, her pink dress stained with a bib of blood. There’s a small hole in her dress, at the seam of the waist, and the patch of smooth skin that peeks through catches Ace’s eye. He can’t look away from it. Her blood is still on his face, still wet.

Sitting still, his hands on his knees and his engineer boots in a puddle of cooling blood, Ace settles to staring forward at nothing. There are holes in the knees of his blue jeans from hitting the pavement, but there’s no scraped knees, no blood of his own. It’s unreal. And his wrist...

“Now, now, David, what’s wrong?” Max asks in his soft, cloying way. _Ace_ , a voice in the back of his mind reminds him, _my name is Ace_. “Haven’t you ever seen a dead body before?” 

Of course he has. He was around when Teddy Duchamp got his ears burned off by his loony father-- had been kicking cats in the empty lot at the end of the Duchamp’s block, heard the screaming and went running to peek. You never know what you’ll be able to see if you get there before the cops. But loony old Duchamp wouldn’t let anyone in the house at all. The boy had looked pretty dead when the cops finally took him out of there. All pale and bleeding and blistered. And of course he’d seen the Browers boy, eaten up and bloated and battered. Hit by a train and dead dead dead. Now _that_ had been a corpse. The corpses now are nothing like that. If not for all the blood, and the garish bite marks, they could nearly be sleeping. No missing eyes, no ground up limbs. These are just… people. Just dead people.

He feels half dead too. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lie down with them...

Max’s cool hand finds the back of Ace’s neck. “Now you need to kill.”

“What?” 

“It’s the last piece, David. Then you’ll truly be like me.” Ace looks at him. His heart feels empty. Like Max. What a concept. 

Christ. It isn’t exactly the new life he’d imagined. 

The hand on his neck rubs small, idle circles around the upper knobs of his spine. The sensation scrapes at the inside of his skull. Max could snap his neck like this, that’s what it is, and the threat sets every fiber of Ace’s being on edge. “To truly become a…” Max pauses, giving a _hm-hm_ kind of laugh, “vampire you must kill. That’s the last step.”

The blood in Ace’s stomach gives a slow churn. “So what am I now?” His lip curls in disdain. The ice in his chest solidifies into something nasty. 

“Just half,” Max says cheerily. He rubs at a smear of blood on his shirt. 

If Ace still had his switch, he thinks he would go after Max again. Not that he thinks it’d do any good, or hurt him any, but because it would feel good to tear up his stupid long face and his terrible patterned shirt. It might even feel good to get beaten up for it. Like how it used to feel good to spit in his father’s face and get a fist back. Satisfying. Meanness is building in him. A familiar feeling. It’s almost a comfort. “What if I don’t want it?” Not just meanness, either. There’s more too it. The deadness that comes with self-destruction. Like drag racing or playing chicken with trucks on the highway. Go big or go home in pieces. The trick is to not be afraid or excited, or to feel anything at all. 

Max just laughs. “You do, my boy. Of course you do. Now--” he sits up sharply, displacing Thorn’s head from his lap. “Come with me.” The hand on Ace’s neck disappears, Max pats his knees twice, then stands. Just like a schoolteacher again. Ace doesn’t move. He’s still staring at the hole in the dead woman’s dress. “Come along, David.” 

“Man, I oughta tear you up,” he sneers even as he does heave himself to his feet. His boots catch in the drying blood. For some reason, that more than anything else brings some lingering reserve to the fore. 

He’s done bad shit all his life, and liked it. Nothing in his life has ever felt better than breaking Gordie Lachance’s stupid nose after he called him a motherfucker and told him to suck. Nothing better than breaking a pool cue over some snots head who gave him lip. He loves doing bad shit. But he loves doing it alone. On his own terms. He’s always been boss of his own gang. No one in Castle Rock could ever come close to dominating him. No one ever even tried to tell him what to do. Even his dad who thrashed him for disobedience could get Ace to lie down.

“No, man,” he says, and Max stops walking. He doesn’t turn, not completely, but he quirks his head back over his shoulder enough that the rim of his glasses and his bird nose appear in view. “I’m not gonna do what you say just because you say it. Shits to that.” He scrubs at his face with the back of his sleeve, coming away with thick smears of blood. “Sincerely.” His lip curls again, bitter and furious. He wants to fight, he’s ready to fight, he wants to tear into something with his bare hands, and the power of that feeling surges through him and he thinks, _I could_. Could tear a body apart with his bare hands. Bathe in the blood and rampage. And then, like a rubber band snapping, he’s not angry any more. He’s too startled to be angry. His teeth are too long-- not the eye teeth, like in the comics, but the little ones between the eyes and the front teeth. A flash of terror and he purses his mouth closed. They’re too big. They’re too sharp.

“You’ll come around,” Max says slowly, his face held in a placid, patient smile. “I know you will.” Hands in his pockets, looking for all the world like the harmless dweeb who picked Ace up yesterday evening, Max shrugs. Calmly, he surveys the scene he created. The two bleeding corpses and Ace, standing near the sofa with holes in his jeans and blood all over him. It’s on his boots, his jacket, in his hair. “Don’t you look a fright,” he laughs. 

Max tells him to wait where he is and leaves Thorn to watch him. When Ace tries to leave, Thorn growls and barks, snapping teeth at him. Max brings Ace’s rucksack in from the car, in case he wants a change of clothes, which is a laugh riot. Ace had barely packed, tossing together nothing more than a spare pair of jeans, a few shirts, socks and underthings, the bare minimum to keep relatively fresh for as long as he ended up hitching. Ace leaves the bag on a table, out of the blood, and retreats to the sofa again. 

Stubborn is what his father would call it. So be it. 

Eventually he realizes his teeth are back to normal. Not sharp, not big. Just teeth. But he’s changed. That’s just facts. There’s no going back.

-

The hunger, when it comes, is terrible, terrible. It comes as suddenly as it did before, but it’s worse this time. It knocks him on his back as sure as a shotgun spray to the gut. Howling, he curls against himself, clawing at his belly and face. His nails leave painful red crescents on his palms and arms and cheeks. Max appears. He smiles and sits with him and hushes him and softly tells him how it'll pass, how if he kills and feeds it'll pass sooner. Max pets his head, smoothing down his hair. 

"You have to kill, David," he purrs. "It's not so bad, and then it will be over." 

“I don’t want to,” Ace mewls.

“Yes, you do.”

Maybe he does. Maybe it’s all he’s ever wanted. Maybe it’s what his entire shit-heel life was leading to. Murder. He’s already accomplice to these two dead farmers. The edge is looming closer and closer, and he might tip over it at any moment.

And it hurts. It hurts to fight it. What’s the point? 

What’s there to do but give in? Bow down to a greater authority and be guided, be cared for? 

“What does it mean?” He’s whimpering, which is pathetic, but he can’t help it. There’s glass in his stomach, after all, roiling around and stabbing him. The world goes a little blurry before his eyes.

“What?” Max’s fingers run along his hairline and the crest of his skull. His own mother wasn’t so gentle with him.

“To be… like you.”

“It means you’ll live forever.” Max’s soft voice is a tonic washing over him. Soothing away the pain in his body, the sharp pressure behind his teeth. In it’s absence, a heavy exhaustion falls over him. “You’ll never grow old, and you’ll never die. You’ll be free to do what you want and take what you want. And with me, you’ll never be alone. We’ll be a family, David. A family we can build for ourselves.” 

“Am I dying?” 

“Yes.” 

Ace Merrill lays as still as he can. His options fold over each other in his mind, twisting messily like an oil spill. The room spins around him until the only steady thing is Max and the dead bodies, three fixed points in a world that is collapsing.

The pain returns in a wave of sharp agonies, tensing every muscle in Ace’s body, grinding together all his bones. Max’s cool hands settle on the sides of his face and lift, forcing Ace to crane his neck and twist his back. Too weak to resist, Ace allows himself to be moved and examined. Max’s hold is hard on his face, pinching and pressing. A finger slips into his mouth and over his teeth, then is gone. His head is lowered back onto the pillow of Max’s thigh. The smell of blood hits his nose, sudden and hot. Blinking slowly, Ace lifts his eyes to see Max’s wrist is being offered to him. Blood slides out of a slash across the thin skin on the inside, and Ace’s teeth prick at it. Drops tumble down to stain the sofa, Max’s trousers. What a waste, something in Ace says. Something that isn’t him, or wasn’t him but is now. Something unfamiliar but hungry, and when the wrist is put to his mouth he doesn’t fight it. 

This blood is thicker, heavier as it goes down his throat than the blood from the woman was. It dampens the cramping pain in his stomach and gives him the same buzz in his ears as the blood from the bottle in the car had yesterday. Max keeps petting his head, gently keeping him in place, encouraging him.

The pain recedes and Max takes his wrist away, leaving Ace panting against his thigh, woozy now and buckling under exhaustion and exhilaration and terror and resignation all at once. He licks at his wet lips and catches fabric. 

Deep inside, a voice from far away, a voice that was the Ace Merrill who smashed mailboxes and spit at cops and broke bottles and fingers, and fucked half the girls in town, said, _This isn’t you. You aren’t some baby. Get your head off this fags lap. Get up and fight_. But that voice didn’t seem to represent him any more, and the venom it contained couldn’t find its way into his blood. Too much other blood in him now. So he stays still and quiet, and feels Max’s cool touch against his hair.

His hair which he had been bleaching to mixed results for a year and a half. It’s laughable to him now, the vanity of it. 

“Why me?” His voice sounds small and broken, even to him.

“Why not you, my boy?” 

Ace’s heart stutters in his chest. _Why anyone?_ His bones shift. He’s changing, and he can either choose to accept it or continue to suffer. Pain is one thing, he knows. Nothing wrong with pain. Pain is good sometimes. It can be cleansing. Suffering though… Suffering is why he left Castle Rock. Suffering isn’t to be tolerated if it can be stopped. 

There’s no choice here at all. The moment he got in the car with Max his choice was gone. He’s been snatched up off the street like any vagrant kid, and killed. He’s been killed, that’s all. Max killed him. This is the end of Ace Merrill of Castle Rock, Maine. It’s over. Dead, dead, dead.

He can’t bring himself to care.

Somehow, inexplicably, his ragged and drained body falls asleep on him. It gives up right from under him. As he’s laying there, realizing that he _will_ kill and he _will_ feed and he _will_ join Max’s nightmare coven family, or whatever it is Max wants, he drifts off into a sleep. Curled up on the blood stained sofa of a woman he helped kill, whose blood still stains his face, his head resting on Max’s thigh and Max’s hand in his hair, he falls asleep. 

He doesn’t dream.

When he wakes up, Thorn is nuzzling his hand. Contentedness has come over him, like the first snow in the winter. A wash of white blankness. His head is still in Max’s lap. It’s the kind of soft familial gentleness he has never experienced. Blinking awake, Ace clears the cotton from his head and sits up. The hunger has settled into a low want at the base of his belly. Something in him has snapped and broken, leaving him limp and pliant.

“There you are,” Max says warmly. “Right on time; the sun is coming up. You’ll be alright still, for a while longer.” As if there’s no concern that Ace might try and run off, or hurt him, Max gives a friendly smile and stands. Ace has never broken a horse, but now he thinks perhaps he knows how the horse feels once it’s done. “Enjoy your day. Get some rest. I’ll be in the cellar until the sun sets.” He pats Ace on the leg and saunters off. Thorn follows, wagging his tail. Max’s footsteps go into the hallway and down a flight of stairs. Thorn’s clacking paw-steps settle in front of the door, keeping guard. 

The house is silent. Not even the creaking of wood or the chirp of birds disrupts the quiet. Ace sits, staring at the holes in the knees of his jeans. He cracks his wrists and all his knuckles. 

After an hour, when the sun has properly started to rise, he goes out onto the porch. The sky goes from black to purple to pink to orange, and Ace Merrill sits with his back against the house and watches it’s slow progression. From where he’s sitting, he can see Max’s big Chevy parked out on the side of the road. It glints. He doesn’t consider going out and boosting it to make an escape. The thought doesn’t even cross his mind.

The air is crisp and clean and cool. It’s autumn. The farmers were probably just finishing up harvesting for the year. No more harvesting for them. 

At half past seven, he smokes a cigarette. The sun is up now, the sky is a bright blue. It hurts his eyes. 

At ten he wanders back into the house. The kitchen is bright and sunny, with yellow curtains. There are flowers in a simple glass vase on the window sill over the sink. Ace sits at the table and puts his head down against the cool oak. This is his last day. He can’t imagine how to make the most of it. Every part of him is heavy and stuffed with cotton. 

At noon, still tired and groggy, he finds a bathroom with the full intention of washing his face. The sight of himself in the mirror shocks him, mostly because it’s hardly there. He’s fading away. The door is visible through his chest. What he does see of himself looks bad-- pale, drawn, hangdog tired, with bruises along his cheekbones and jaw and down his throat. Washed up and washed out. His hair looks particularly yellow against his very white skin. The blood on his face doesn’t actually bother him much to look at. He’s been covered in blood more times that he can count and this isn’t much different. Previously it had been from some punk throwing an elbow at his face during a rumble, but this looks the same. A dark smear under his nose and over his chin. It’s dried enough to flake.

And to think he sat on the porch like this for two hours. Anyone driving up would have been horrified, and for good reason. 

Ace splashes water over his face and scrubs at the clots to get them off. The clear water turns to red in the sink, then goes clear again. They probably would have called the cops. Oh well.

Off comes his damp, spattered jacket and the blood stained t-shirt. There’s the baby fat chest, not quite barrell-shaped like his father’s, just a little thick. Soft. 

He’d put on weight since getting out of school— he’d graduated too, despite all claims that he wouldn’t. Which was why he’d worked so hard to get that fuckin’ diploma, not that it mattered, but because everyone said he couldn’t. Ace Merrill wasn’t stupid. He could do well in school if he wanted, and goddamn if he wasn’t spiteful as hell. So he’d graduated, by the skin of his teeth, sure, but he’d done it. And for some reason after that, maybe just that he was sincerely not a child anymore and not a toughie teen hoodlum, but an adult hoodlum out of school and with nothing more to accomplish-- and maybe he was drinking more than he had when at least some of his hours had been occupied morosely haunting the back of a classroom-- he’d put on a few extra pounds. Nothing too bad, no beer belly or anything, but some pounds across his ribs and some added softness to his cheeks. Thickened him up a little, gave him a baby fat look again, which he’d trimmed off becoming the hardest fucker under thirty in Castle Rock.

Becoming like Max means he’ll always be like this. Soft around the middle. Just like this. 

He would have gone to fat, Ace thinks, given another ten years. Maybe it’s better to die young. Probably it is. 

His life was going pretty damn well before that Labor Day weekend three years before when little Lachance and Chambers and those other snots cheated him out of something he'd wanted. Something that would have, could have, changed his life around. Something that could have made him a small hero, for a season, and opened a few doors for him. Instead of having them slammed in his face. Those snots had cheated him and ruined everything.

His stomach starts to groan and growl. 

Everything could have been different if his luck hadn't turned that Labor Day weekend before his junior year of high school. Yes, he can see now, that was the turning point.

The numbness sits heavy and thick over his mind. Half alive, half dead. His teeth are aching again. 

His life turned bad on him at sixteen and now, at nineteen, his life is over. Another turning point. _Ha, ha_.

At two he finds himself back in the bloodied sitting room. The corpses are starting to turn. Flies are accumulating around their open, blackening wounds. Ace can’t bring himself to do anything about it, so he grabs his pack quickly and turns his back to go sit at the kitchen table again. 

Thorn watches him pace, his snout following like the audience at a tennis match as Ace wanders from kitchen to sitting room to bathroom, watching his reflection fade and waver, watching the corpses begin to rot, watching the curtains flutter in a mild breeze, rustling the dying flowers. 

Putting on a clean shirt doesn’t make him feel better. Putting the browning jacket over it somehow does.

At seven, Ace finds he’s been sitting at the table without moving for three hours. The sun has disappeared, leaving the sky a pinkish orange color. It’s autumn in New England and Ace vaguely thinks that this might be the last sunset he’ll ever see. It makes him laugh. 

His ears hear rustling from the hallway, the sound of Thorn scratching at the door to the cellar. There are sounds of water running from the bathroom, then Max emerges into the kitchen. He looks bright. Chipper even. There’s a pep in his step. There are still spots of blood on his shirt. 

“Hello, my boy.” Ace rolls his head up off the table. “You don’t look well. Did you sleep at all?” Ace shakes his head. “Hm. I would have recommended it. Well, you’ll get used to it. Now,” Max gives a bright grin and claps his hands together. “Are you ready?”

Ace nods. It’s all he can manage. 

-

Max leads him up the stairs. The hallway upstairs is so domestic it makes him sick-- the only thing that disturbs it is the overturned little table halfway down. Like someone made a run for it and knocked it over. On the floor is a single crushed flower in a little vase and a sad doily, abandoned and crumpled. 

“This way now,” Max says, waving him along. “You’ve kept them waiting so long.” 

The door at the end of the hallway is closed. Around it, the wallpaper is cheerful, cream with thin, pale pinstripes. Max floats forward. His hand finds the round brass doorknob and twists. The oak door, heavy, carved with panels, swings open on it’s hinges without a single creak. One shoulder folds through the opening and when Max’s body is out of the way, Ace sees, framed by the door, a pair of teenagers huddled against the back wall of the room. Like a picture. A bedroom. Ace drifts forward, through the doorway and towards what he’s resigned himself to do. Towards what he wants to do, isn’t that it? He wants to. 

There are two of them. Two-- a boy and a girl. Both teenagers, alike enough looking to be siblings. They tremble, clutching each other. The boy has his arms around the girl, glaring at them defensively. There’s terror in his eyes, as much as in his sisters, but pride too. What a sight Max and he must be, coated in blood, their parents blood, and here to kill. And he is, Ace thinks, here to kill. Seeing them, and feeling their thrumming hearts, he believes what Max says. He’ll kill and he’ll eat and he’ll be like Max. No other option, no other way. 

“Your pick,” Max says. His hands are tight on Ace’s shoulders, fatherly almost, and his breath is cool against Ace’s ear, not fatherly at all. Something else. Predatory. Like a hunter. “For your first.”

A choice. Two of them. Two options. A boy and a girl. 

“Christ,” the boy says. He’s got a strong jaw and a tight accent that falls strangely on Ace’s rural Maine ears. Ace blinks at him. “You’re gonna kill us? Is that it?” 

He’s so blunt. So brave. Ace’s scalp tingles. 

Ace can’t speak. His mouth hurts again, the pressure beneath his teeth builds. He wants to sink them into something. Blood pounds in his ears, filling his thoughts with fog and cotton and hunger. 

“Yes, that is exactly it, young man,” Max says with a chipper little laugh. “We’re going to kill you. Now let’s have a look at you.” 

He goes over to the pair and pulls them up to their feet and apart. Max arranges them like dolls for Ace’s perusal. Their spines are straightened, their arms turned out. His long fingers arrange the girl’s hair just so and she shivers. Tears streak down her face. 

The girl is lean, not curvy at all, but cute enough. Her hair falls in trembling curls to her shoulders. Her pouting mouth is pretty, even curled up in terror and the attempt to not cry out loud. Even the tears on her face are pretty. Ace takes a step towards her and gets a slight waft of perfume off her. Floral. How soft her skin would be under his hands, how easy it would be to pull her against him. Against his sticky, blood-stained shirt and sticky, blood-stained mouth. But picturing it makes him uneasy. Killing a girl seems unfair somehow, and ugly. He’d never beat up on a girl, not even in his worst mean streaks. He can’t fathom killing a girl. He’s not sure how much violence it’ll take. He can’t. Not this girl. It just feels… impossible. 

So he turns to the boy. He’s tall, taller than Ace, and the way he’s gritting his teeth makes his jaw pop. Dark hair sits lushly on his forehead, cropped tight in the back. He’s a farmer, a strong, hearty young man. He’s probably a football star at his school. A tremor crosses Ace’s spine. There were football stars in Castle Rock too. They were all assholes. 

“You’re just a thug,” the kid hisses at him. He stays still though, stubbornly watching Ace circle him. His heartbeat flutters visibly in his throat. A sting hits Ace in the teeth. 

“I guess I am,” he mumbles back. A thug. Sure. It's all he's ever been. The warmth radiating off the kid’s body is intoxicating. It sends rolling waves of tingling pleasure through his his nerves. Max is there, suddenly, with both hands on the kid’s shoulders, holding him firmly in place.

“Go ahead, David,” his voice says, coming out of the dark. All Ace can see is the fluttering pulse in the boy’s throat, the tan smoothness of his skin, the hard line of his jaw. It’s tunnel vision. The girl is gone, Max is gone, the farmhouse and the world outside is gone. It’s just this boy and his blood and Ace. Ace who feels like he’s leaving his body, floating away on the current of this boy’s warm red blood. 

His teeth are too big again, too sharp. His face tingles and he presses forward, putting his cheek to the boy’s neck. The pulse there rattles through his skull like a bell. 

“Fuck you,” the boy hisses from miles away. He’s wound tight as piano wire and Ace can feel it, feel the tension in every muscle, every twanging tendon. Running palms over the boy’s ribs, the heart starts to pound. It’s amazing, like getting high. Ace tastes his skin, hot and salty against the flat of his tongue. The thrum of blood just under the surface… so close… 

“Go on, David,” Max says again, closer now, his voice a warm breath right over his shoulder. “Eat.” A cool hand settles heavily on the back of his neck and a shiver spikes down his spine. “Kill him.”

The world blurs into fuzzy pinkness. 

For a man like Ace Merrill, the only urge stronger than the urge to dominate is the urge to roll over and offer his undefended neck to a greater authority. To go belly up when the real leader of the pack makes an appearance. Faced now with real, undefeatable, genuine authority and power, Ace Merrill crumbles. Like a paper flower, his personality folds under the thumb of something stronger and older than he, something immense and overwhelming as a hurricane wave. Ace crumbles into the comfort of being controlled, and Ace obeys.

He kills, sinking his teeth into the throat before him and feeling the harsh sweet pour of blood. Like the richest ambrosia, the boy's blood slides over his jaw and he laps it up, holding the firm but weakening body tightly against himself. Hands press weakly against him, trying to part them. Somewhere far away there is a girl screaming, but Ace can only hear the ragged moaning of the boy whose blood he’s drinking. It's hot against his tongue, hot and rich and delicious. 

Like kissing, like fucking. Hot and wet and intoxicating.

The boys life slips out of him, draining away into Ace's mouth with his blood. The hands pressing against him loosen, tighten in his shirt, then loosen again. He feels the exact moment the boy dies in his arms and something in him dies with him.

Dropping to the floor, he lets the body go. His own body shudders and shakes. Against the hardwood floor, his kneecaps rattle. He’s on fire. He’s panting, hard, unable to catch his breath. It’s hard to say whether this feeling is good or bad.

A hand slides into his hair. “There, there, David. It’s done.” 

David. It seems right now. Ace Merrill is gone, long gone, as dead as he boy on the floor. Ace Merrill was brought into this house, but it’ll be David who walks out. _David_. That’s fine. That’s fine.

The hand in his hair tightens and takes a hard handful. David allows himself to be dragged to his knees. His hands grope to find purchase, until he finds himself clutching at Max’s belt, his cheek pressed to the front of his trousers. His breath comes in harsh, painful drags. His wet mouth leaves blood marks on the creases of Max’s pants. 

“You’ve done it, my boy. How do you feel?”

Dead, he thinks. He feels dead. 

Dead, sure. But also so very alive. 

-

He looks at the jeans and white undershirts in his pack and his skin crawls. He can’t dress like dead Ace Merrill anymore. The only thing worth keeping is his battered leather jacket, which he’d shoved into his pack at the last second. It’s tough and it’s his and maybe it still suits him. The rest he wants rid of as soon as possible.

Ace Merrill was a shitty kid and a shitty adult. 

This new version will be better. Stronger. _More_.

-

He vomits a lot for the first six months. Max keeps saying it will stop, in time, but every time he feeds he hurls most of it up again. Sometimes it’s immediately after, sometimes it’s the next night. But up it comes, paler than when it went down, thicker, still red, horribly ugly. 

The vomiting does, eventually, stop. Just like Max said.

Max says a lot of things that are true-- that he shouldn’t try to stay awake past dawn, because his body won’t be able to function in the daylight, or without sleep. That crosses and garlic are a joke, but holy water should be avoided. Fire will kill you, sunlight will kill you, a wooden stake through the heart will kill you. A wooden stake anywhere else will not, which David learns first hand after a meal manages to stab a tree branch through his arm. That one hurts pretty badly, and Max bandages him and gives him blood, lets him rest his head in his lap and soothes him to sleep. When he wakes up, the wound is gone. Healing is faster, Max says, especially when you’re well fed. 

“How long have you been at it?” David asks, prodding at the unmarked skin of his bicep. 

“At what?”

“Being a… you know.” 

Max smiles. He looks pleased. “Oh, my boy, a very long time. Lifetimes.”

David nods, and thinks. Max hands him a clean shirt, which he pulls on. It ruffles his hair, which is starting to get long. He didn’t think his hair would grow, or change, but it does. Max told him, _hair and nails, David, continue to grow after death_. Like it was funny. Like David had forgotten that he was dead. Like he could. 

He opens to mouth to ask if Max has changed people before-- other boys like him. It occurs to him that if he asks, he’ll have to ask the obvious follow up: _What happened to them?_

So he shuts his mouth and says nothing at all.

-

Eventually killing becomes not only easy, but fun. Satisfying. There’s a certain pleasure in tearing into flesh and tasting fear mingled with the hot spice of blood. After that first blood bath, which David realizes now was just to show off, just to make a scene for his benefit, Max is tidy about his killing. He almost always goes for women, unless they’re picking off a whole family. He prefers them. The way they sigh and scream and faint and push at him and claw. For David, it takes a long time to wrap his head around killing girls. Men at least put up a fight, and David loves a fight. Loves to win a fight. Always has. Loves to punch and beat and subdue. Loves the feel of cracking bone under his knuckles-- for the first year every crunching bone brings back the sense memory of hot sidewalk under his knees when he broke Gordie Lachance’s nose after he and Chambers stole the Browers kid from him. The feeling of it pricks at the back of his teeth every time, the memory of stamping down on his hand and breaking fingers. Now he would sink teeth into little Gordie’s fucking twig of a neck and drain him dry. It’s satisfying to imagine. 

Max always admonishes him-- he’s trying to be a dad to him, trying to tame him, raise him right. Raise him to be-- ha ha-- civilized. It’s a little too late for that, but David doesn’t quite mind the effort. It’s pleasant to be cared for in any way. Max is trying to guide him in the ways of vampirism, and David tries, sometimes, to pay attention. He’s willing, at least, to try. “That was very brutal, David,” Max chides gently. “Very nasty.” He clucks his tongue and shakes his head and wipes spots of blood off his glasses. 

But nasty is as nasty does and nasty is what David is. What he’s always been. Sincerely.

-

They pick up Paul in Illinois, six years later in 1968, in a shitty small town as bad as Castle Rock, and he’s happy to go with them. 

It had been just the two of them for years, and Max seemed to like it-- having company as he wandered the country. They rode into towns and were accepted as father and slightly wayward son, then stayed for a day or a week or a month, to feed and terrorize and explore, and then move on. Usually it was David doing the terrorizing, but still, sometimes Max could be goaded into a little mess. They find hidey-holes all over to sleep in, or fold into the trunk of Max’s big Chevy, tucked together like mice.

When David starts to chafe, Max says thoughtfully, “Maybe you need someone your own age.” And that’s how they end up with Paul. A month later it’s Dwayne in Oklahoma. Those two hit it off right away. It’s because they’re the same. Big and strong and confident. _Good for them_ , David thinks, a little sour.

They settle in California in the early 70s, because it’s so easy. No one asks questions, no one cares. A man shows up with three teenage boys in tow and no one bats an eye. There are so many scenes and cultures and people bounce so freely between them that a missing boy here or dead girl there hardly seems to cause a wave in anyone’s pool. The weather is temperate and the skies are big. And Paul can get weed easily, which he likes. Everything is easy is California. 

Marko is a new addition, a baby really. A Santa Carla native. Paul finds him under the boardwalk in 1978, a gentle surf bum with a dazzling grin. It’s Marko who brings them to the sunken hotel, who shows them all the nooks and crannies. It’s a good spot, and David smiles his gentle smile and agrees that Marko should meet Max.

-

When an author named Gordon Lachance appears on the Bestsellers list, David can’t believe it could be the same one. Santa Carla has four bookstores, but only one that carries new books fresh from the publishers, so it’s to that one that David goes to find a copy of _Clarion Bell_ by Gordon Lachance. It’s a horror book, and it’s not bad, and David spends a couple long nights reading it on a bench on the boardwalk, under a glowing yellow street lamp. The whole thing stinks of Castle Rock. Maybe Lachance never left, bestseller or no. What a dweeb.

The same night he finishes the book and tosses it into the surf, they all do coke under the neon lights at the back of the arcade and David likes it. His vampire blood clears it out too quickly to be worth doing much of, but in another life, who knows? It’s a pretty good buzz. His scalp tingles warmly and it feels like being in love. Dwyane drops a hand onto his shoulder and grins at him, and David feels a surge of warmth for him, and for Paul too, rolling a joint where he leans against a Galaxian machine nearby. Marko shakes out his hair and David laughs. Maybe it’s the coke, but today he feels pretty good. Far away from Castle Rock. Never going back. Living this better, more thrilling life. And it is better. It is. 

“Let’s hit it,” he growls, and the boys nod and grin, and the four of them head out onto the boardwalk to cause some trouble. 

He had always, always, loved making trouble surrounded by a pack of boys. And now he has his pack-- and what a pack they are. Wild, tough, unstoppable. And they accept him as a leader, because he’s the oldest, yes, and they recognize the brutality in him. They all feed off it. The thrill of being coated in still-hot blood, the heart pounding exhilaration that comes with the sound of screams. 

Killing is very intimate and very thrilling, and David gets very good at it. 

It’s exciting and pleasurable, feeling bodies bend and give under his hands and teeth. He learns the gentle way to press an artery, the way a finger against a jaw exposes smooth patches of thin skin. He relishes the way that people pant under his teeth, breathing hot and heavy against him and then thinner and tremulous as their hearts give out. In Castle Rock, Ace Merrill had fucked his way through every girl who’d let him, Protestants and Episcopals and even the rare Jew or rarer Catholic who was mad at her father. For David, killing is better than fucking, and hotter, and it sets his blood ringing better than fucking girls ever did. And there’re more options. There are girls, who he’s come around on devouring, and then there are boys, with their muscles and the way they always fight back. David occasionally comes away from feeding with dark blooms of bruises, and those, he finds, feel particularly invigorating. The struggle, the hunt. The pain. The satisfaction of finally coming out on top. David, the conqueror. 

David guides his boys through it, the sink of teeth, the crush of throats, the stink of wet blood. They’re all strong and powerful, and so alive. So thrilled to be monsters, so thrilled to live forever. 

They follow him because when he lets loose, he’s as inhuman as a monster can be. He tears into flesh and rips the doors off cars. He thrashes and kills and brutalizes. More, they follow him because he’s aloof. He rarely tussles with them, rarely pushes and teases. Because he’s above them, and he knows it, and they know it. It’s the same way his gang in Castle Rock bowed to him. He was beyond them, set apart just enough to be better, tougher, cooler. He doesn’t let loose often, like they do. He keeps himself tightly contained, always in control. They-- Paul and Dwyane and Marko-- respect him for it. They’re friends, brothers, but David is in charge of their little cohort just like Max is in charge of him. The eldest brother charged with taking care of the younger ones by a looming but distant father. 

David is the only one who spends time with Max in the short hours between the video store closing and sunrise. David is the one who confers, talks, plays chess with Max, lays on his sofas and reads his books and stares at the ceiling while Max touches his hair. The rest would be welcome, certainly, but they leave it to David and David alone. He’s the only one who ever wants to go. 

Because just like the boys in Castle Rock, they’re not quite up to par. They’re good boys, bad boys, tough and mean and _his_. But they’re not… equals. They don’t challenge him. They’re below him, and below Max, and they always will be. 

It’s not their fault, but it’s disappointing.

That’s part of the big problem for David-- which is that, already, the thrill is gone. Too much disappointment, too much boredom. The vampire life isn’t exactly all it was cracked up to be. Max is old, so much older than he is, yet he still seems to take pleasure in living. In the stupid day to day of waking up. David can’t quite figure it out… Maybe it's the boys he takes pleasure in-- likes to see them romp and frolic and kill and eat. Maybe it’s the human life he plays at, the people he convinces he’s one of them. It’s not like that for David. He likes his boys, sure, he even likes Max, more or less, but... David is bored of being nineteen, even as being nineteen becomes a time of more and more opportunity. Even as the boardwalk builds up to a mecca of disaffected youths who drift in and out of town, and when some go missing, no one can care enough to look for them. No one ever cared to ever go looking for Ace Merrill, that’s for sure.

The boredom continues to eat him up, even as he grows his hair and bleaches it as white as it can get, even as he tilts his head so Marko can put a needle through his ear, even as they eat a pack of bikers and inherit their rip-roaring motorbikes. He _tries_ to enjoy it, he really does. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. 

If he were still in Castle Rock, a place he almost never thinks about any more, surely he would be smoking and drinking and shooting pool still. Just like he was at nineteen. Or maybe he’d be dead. Bored in Castle Rock or bored in Santa Carla, dead in Castle Rock or dead in Santa Carla-- what's the fucking difference? 

There are still moments of thrills and joys-- racing along the beach, his bike growling and spitting under him, his boys howling into the night nearby, the wind rushing through his hair-- real moments that make him feel purely good, purely alive. But the moments don’t last. They never do. 

-

Lachance drops a book of short stories a few years later, and in one of them, a pretty decent coming of age yarn, David finds himself. Lachance is writing about a true thing, hiding it in fiction, in plain sight. The rest of the stories are horror, mostly, and one sortof silly melodrama, and then comes this fucking _thing_ that he knows because he lived it. Not all of it, but right there in the first ten pages is his fucking name. His name, the one he’d thrown away long ago, along with the rest of Castle Rock. 

Ace. 

Merrill.

He can’t believe it. His mouth falls open in surprise, forming an O that is described as “delicate” towards the end of the story. _Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit_. 

“David, what’s up over there?” Paul calls from across the hotel. “You look like someone fucked your mother.” 

Marko crows with laughter and kicks dust into the air, scattering a clutch of birds.

They’ve only ever known him as David and he’s never told them anything much about his life before all this. He’s not about to start now. What does it matter, anyway, who he used to be? What does it matter what some asshole wrote in a book? What does it matter that when Gordon Lachance reports on whatever happened to Ace Merrill, what he writes is this: “As for Ace Merrill, two years later he wandered out of town one night in October, and was never heard from again. What became of him was gossip for a few weeks, then everyone seemed to agree that no matter what the truth was, all that really mattered was that he was gone and everyone’s mailboxes were finally safe. When my fingers ache in bad weather, I occasionally think of him. I imagine him on the side of the highway on a cool fall evening, escaping Castle Rock like we all always wanted to do. I can’t imagine much further than that. Probably, like everyone else in this story save for me, he’s dead.” 

Who cares about that? When was the last time he cared what anyone in Castle Rock thought about him anyway? Over twenty years ago. At least. 

Fuck it. But if Gordon Lachance ever comes to Santa Carla, he’ll be sorry.

He chucks the book across the room, where it smashes a mirror next to Paul’s head. 

The boys howl with laughter among the tinkling clatter of falling glass, and David runs across the room to get into a fight. 

Ace Merrill is dead anyway. Dead, dead, dead. Long dead. Who cares about him? 

He gets a handful of Paul’s hair and bares his teeth. Paul growls right back, but there’s laughter in his eyes. Paul kicks David’s feet out from under him and the tussle begins in earnest. 

That’s the last time he thinks about Ace Merrill for nearly ten years.


End file.
